Avec L'Auteur : Olivier Guez

An extraordinary novel about one of history’s most reviled figures, written as an action-packed historical biography.

“As gruesome as it is indelible. "
--Diane Cole, The Washington Post

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Verso Books, 2022) traces Josef Mengele’s footsteps through years of flight in South America. For three decades, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police, and the world’s journalists—until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979. In this rigorously factual novel, Olivier Guez traces Mengele’s footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century. The chilling novel, a recipient of the 2017 Renaudot literary prize in France, received high praise from publications such as Washington Post, the Times, and Forward among others.

Olivier Guez is the author of several novels and essays translated in over thirty languages. Born in Strasbourg in 1974, he is the co-author of the screenplay der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (Fritz Bauer, a German Hero), for which he won the 2016 German Oscar for best script and is the author of American spleen (Flammarion 2012), and La Disparition de Josef Mengele, which is being released by Verso in a translation by Georgia de Chamberet.

Anne-Sophie Rouveloux was born in the South of France but spent most of her life in Paris. Over the course of her 10 year career as a bookseller and chroniqueuse, she has interviewed many authors for French magazines and radio shows. She lives in Chicago with her husband, where she teaches French and ESL.

Georgia de Chamberet is a committee member of English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme. As an editor at Quartet Books in the 1990s she published contemporary writers Tahar Ben Jelloun, Annie Ernaux, Juan Carlos Onetti, Daniel Pennac and Simon Leys (winner of the 1992 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction) amongst others, as well as showcasing various Cuban writers in an anthology edited by Peter Bush.

© Claude Truong-Ngoc